


For Now

by elle_stone



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bellarke AU Week, F/M, More implied or pre-Bellarke than romantic Bellarke, S3 AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-19
Updated: 2016-07-19
Packaged: 2018-07-25 08:05:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7524856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elle_stone/pseuds/elle_stone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>And he—he was dreaming. He'd come off the night shift at dawn, and fell asleep, fell suddenly and completely into that deep and total sleep that follows utter exhaustion, a sleep with which he's intimately familiar, and which usually yields no dreams. And then he found himself walking through the woods. Walking with no destination, and no hope of home. Walking, finally, toward a familiar voice calling his name.</i>
</p><p>  <i>Monty shaking his shoulder, calling his name.</i><br/> <br/>  <i>He's half-twisted with his face in the pillow and one foot dangling off the edge of the bed; his body hurts in strange places; Monty's face is very close.</i></p><p>  <i>"Bellamy," he's saying. "Bellamy, it's Clarke. She's home."</i></p><p> </p><p>Or: A S3 AU in which Clarke returns to Arkadia on her own.</p>
            </blockquote>





	For Now

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Bellarke AU Week 2016, Day One, Canon Divergent. This is how I wanted S3 to go down, roughly speaking.

She comes back to them dirt-spattered and bruised, and too thin, with the slightest, almost unnoticeable limp. It's late morning— 

_He wasn't there, but he can imagine it, can imagine the exact angle of the light over camp when she first appeared stumbling out of the trees._

—The air is still cold from the chill winter rain that came with dawn. The first guard to see her does not recognize her. A brief moment of panic hits—messenger? intruder? Grounder?—then subsides, as if it had never been. _Somehow we just knew_ , the guard says later, _knew she was one of us_.

Bellamy is not given to the mystic, like this guard is. He doesn't believe in inherent difference either, in a Sky Person aura, in an us-and-them that goes down to the marrow, coded in the blood. But he knows he would not have felt even that moment of uncertainty, if he had been on duty. He knows he would recognize Clarke anywhere.

 

 

To recreate her first moments home is impossible. What he knows: she was ushered quietly through the gate, without fanfare. Immediately sent on to medical. Said almost nothing, asked for no one. Within hours was the subject of gossip bordering on tall tale.

And he—he was dreaming. He'd come off the night shift at dawn, and fell asleep, fell suddenly and completely into that deep and total sleep that follows utter exhaustion, a sleep with which he's intimately familiar, and which usually yields no dreams. And then he found himself walking through the woods. Walking with no destination, and no hope of home. Walking, finally, toward a familiar voice calling his name.

Monty shaking his shoulder, calling his name.

He's half-twisted with his face in the pillow and one foot dangling off the edge of the bed; his body hurts in strange places; Monty's face is very close.

"Bellamy," he's saying. "Bellamy, it's Clarke. She's home."

 

 

Home. The word means nothing to him anymore, and everything. If it exists at all, and perhaps it doesn't, perhaps it can't, he knows that it isn't Arkadia. Gray, sterile, foreign Alpha station cannot be home, never was and cannot be, and Factory is gone, smashed up on the rocks months ago. And the dropship—he hasn't been back since Finn, but he knows what he'd see: grass where their tents once stood, nature threatening to reclaim what they've left behind.

He should be beyond seeing home as a place. More precise to say it's a feeling, or another sense. It's that unique combination of safety, familiarity, and comfort, a cousin of the feeling _family_ brings.

But if that's true then he's never known home, and can't be certain he ever will. If that's true then what he's fought for, suffered for, and killed for may be no more than an illusion, a child's fairy tale, or a dream.

 

 

Abby won't let him see her, and this isn't cruelty or spite; her voice is soft and she puts one hand on his shoulder and it's gentle, reassuring, because she understands. "She's asleep," Abby tells him. "And she needs to sleep."

He understands—but he's waited a long time. Ten weeks of waiting, of rescue missions that go nowhere, rescue missions that he knew would go nowhere, ten weeks of looking for someone who didn't want to be found. For too long, he's thought _I just need to **talk** to her_ , and allowed himself no more. Now he would settle for even less. Now he would settle for looking at her, for knowing she's okay. There's no other thought in his still sleep-fuzzy mind.

Craning up on his toes, trying to see past Abby's shoulder, does nothing. Finally he brings his gaze back to her face. It's worry-lined like his own. If there's anyone in camp who understands this ache in his chest and this nausea in his gut it's Abby.

Perhaps it's the other way around. Perhaps he understands _her_.

He can't think. He's so tired. Clarke is so close.

"Is she hurt?" he asks. His hand's still pressed against the doorframe, fingers curling around the edge.

Abby shakes her head, but when she adds, "Mostly scratches and bruises," she sounds uncertain, and tired, her tone the same as the beat-beat fatigue-headache in his temples, and he understands exactly what she means.

 

 

Clarke sleeps for twelve hours, and for the last eight, he's by her side. Miller takes his shift. Monty brings him food, and sits with him for a while, and tells him in quiet tones what the others are saying. Because everyone knows, by now. The camp is buzzing with stories. Among the Arkadians, it’s mostly wild rumor: that she was unrecognizable, covered in dirt and blood, when she arrived; that she's become skeletal with hunger; that she collapsed at the gate; that she's changed her hair; that she almost attacked a guard, crazed and out of her mind from weeks of solitude, alone out there in the woods.

"Guess they don't have anything better to do than gossip," Bellamy mutters, and his hand twitches into a fist.

"Hey.” Monty shoots him a glare, no malice in it, and half-reaches out a hand as if Bellamy needed bringing down. His voice is somehow both quiet and sharp. "Can't really blame them, can you? They don't know anything about what happened."

He means they don't know about the Mountain. It's nothing to them: an enemy defeated, a victory won, and the cost hidden, victims and survivors so equally invisible that they don't think some might be one and the same. They don’t understand what it means to run from that particular pain and that particular guilt. They don’t know to speak carefully of it.

"You’d think they might take a hint." He's talking to Monty but staring at Clarke. Her hair's grown long and it falls around her face in ratty, unwashed knots. Her hands are dirty and her nails ragged and torn, but her face is clean; he pictures Abby washing it and feels a low wave of jealousy crest, then fall. Then he pretends it was never there. "If none of us want to talk about, there's probably a reason."

Monty doesn’t answer right away. He lets his silence stretch for a long time. But Bellamy isn't surprised, because he knows Monty's silences by now.

“Most of them,” Monty says finally, volume building slowly, like he’s coming back from faraway, “only know who she is because she’s Abby’s daughter, and because of Mount Weather.”

It’s true: what more did they see but one of the kids from the Sky Box, the involuntary advance guard, coming out of nowhere to lead an army of the enemy, defeat another enemy, then disappear into the ether—too good for them, too bad for them, who knew. Some magic trick. If they’ve seen the Mountain at all it’s on supply runs, echoing and empty, full of lifeless useful _things_. The bodies are long gone, buried where strangers will never visit them.

“And our people?” Bellamy asks, because he does not need to say the rest.

"They want to see her." He pauses, allows himself a slight smile. "Abby probably had to sedate Raven to keep her out of here."

Bellamy's mouth quirks up, but just for a moment, and he lets out a gentle huff of breath. He can picture it: Raven determined, almost threatening, leaning in to Abby's space. But he knows that not all of the hundred are as eager to see Clarke again. For most of them, especially for the forty-two, she is as constant but unspoken a ghost as the Mountain itself. They will avoid her in person just as they avoid her in conversation and in memory.

"Tell them that she's okay," he says, even though they don't know yet if she is. Not everyone who looks fine is fine. Not every injury is physical, or visible. But for now, only the assurance matters. "Tell them she's going to be fine."

 

 

It's dark by the time she blinks her eyes open, full dark outside and dim inside, where the old circadians still encourage sleep. Bellamy knows the hour well. He'd been watching Clarke’s face in a slow, bleary way, no urgency in his waiting, and both of them completely still until she turns her head to look at him. Then she smiles at him, which—he realizes only as he feels a slow warmth seep up through his chest—he hadn't really thought she would.

So he smiles back on instinct.

She tries to sit up and he holds out his hand, palm out, a warning signal or a barrier he's not sure. But when she doesn’t stop forcing her body upwards, he leans in and arranges the pillows behind her back instead. He feels a certain relief when she settles against them and sighs. Her eyes fall closed for a long moment, then open again.

“I’m fine, you know. I don’t need to be,” she glances around, “in med bay.” A pause and then, more quietly, almost inaudibly, “You don’t need to worry.”

Bellamy considers telling her that it was Abby who brought her here, not him, but he’s not sure if those last two sentences are even related, or if it matters. Of all the words he could say or needs to say or wants to say, those seem so inconsequential, so small. He opens his mouth a few times, but _all_ words seem like non-words, seem like a distraction from what really matters, and what really matters is too large and too out of focus, a giant seen from too close up, a concept just out of his grasp.

“Do you want me to get Abby?” he asks, finally.

Clarke shakes her head. “No.”

She puts her hands in her lap and looks down at them, her affect, for the moment, so _prim school girl_ that the word _princess_ floats back up to the tip of his tongue. He hates the word now. She might not have been a soldier, down in the dirt, but she saw what even some of their most hardened haven’t seen; she put her own soul on the line for the very people he used to think she floated above. Or walked right over. _Princess_ was a word of disrespect and, all else aside, she has earned his respect at least.

It’s not that he isn’t angry. He’s spent whole days blind with anger, cold with anger, suffocating from anger, has bit through his tongue biting back the effects, has felt it like a disease, and separated himself from those he cannot dare to infect. He’s felt his anger turn to sorrow and to loneliness and back again. He’s asked himself why it matters so much, why this betrayal cut so deep, and he’s come up with a million answers. All are true, and all are insufficient. Because it was a _betrayal_ , he tells himself, of their partnership, of their unspoken promise to take care of their people together. Because the forty-five survivors of the camp they built up from the ground needed her. Because he asked her to stay, and she turned her back like the echo of her own words meant nothing. Because he had to walk back into camp alone, had to tell them she was gone, had to explain why without knowing why, had to be everything to them when she was nothing to them.

But none of that matters now. Not at this hour, not in this quiet, not when he watches the way she tucks one strand of hair behind her ear. Not when she says his name—“Bellamy”—in a quiet and uncertain voice.

“Yeah?”

“How… mmm, how long have I been here?”

Is that really what she wanted to ask? He’s not sure. She won’t look up, won’t look him in the eye. He cannot look anywhere but her.

“Less than a day. Maybe eighteen hours.”

She nods. The way she swallows hard, blinks fast, makes him wonder if she’s trying not to cry. He considers asking if she’s sure she's okay, but he knows she’ll either say she’s not, or she’ll lie. They’re beyond questions like that by now, anyway.

“Is everyone okay?” Clarke asks, after another long silence, and still without looking up.

“Yeah.” It’s a simple answer, but enough for now. “Yeah, everyone’s just fine.”

 

 

He’s by her side the next day when she emerges into the commons, and gets her first real view of the new Arkadia. It’s a quiet hour. Still, every head in the place turns to her. She ignores them all and just takes it in, standing in the doorway with an expression of distant appraisal on her face that only someone raised like she was could ever wear (he thinks, and knows he’s being unfair, but the thought bubbles up despite himself). After a long moment, she finds the nearest spare table, and sits down.

“You’ve done a lot of work here,” Clarke says, as he comes to sit across from her.

He doesn’t know if she means ‘you’ like ‘everyone’ or ‘you’ like ‘Bellamy’—absurd—so he just shrugs. If this is stilted small talk, he’ll pass on it, and if there’s something real beneath the words, he’ll press pause for now. He’s just not ready to sort through the words he knows will come if he dares try to speak. It doesn’t matter that he’s had ten weeks to prepare for today. Each moment only added to the unsaid and the can’t-be-said, and now he needs to learn her face and her voice again, before he can fix what's broken here. He knows a lot is broken here.

Clarke seems on the verge of something soft, perhaps an apology, perhaps a question, perhaps his name, when something just beyond his shoulder distracts her. She tilts up her chin. Her voice has in it a sharpness beyond curiosity or surprise. “Is that—the piano from Mt. Weather?”

He will not sound apologetic. He will not. He will not admit the sick feeling that washed over him when he first saw it taken down from the truck. “Yeah. We’ve started making supply runs—”

“ _Hello_ , look who’s awake!”

The sound startles all other words free.

Together, they turn to follow it, and see that a group of their people has crowded in. Bellamy catches sight of Raven first, at the front of the small crowd, grinning, limping her way around tables until she’s at Clarke’s side, her arms around her—this is the way Bellamy would have hugged her, if he’d been there when she came through the gates. Raven doesn’t let go for a long time. Clarke does not return the hug at first, perhaps startled, but when she does her whole body relaxes visibly, completely, and she buries her nose in Raven’s neck.

The others—Octavia, Lincoln, Monty, Miller, Harper, Monroe—fan out around the table. They’re all smiling, some more brightly and more genuinely than others, and when Raven finally lets go there follows a series of hugs, murmured welcome homes, pats on the back, a mess of _reunion_ from which none of them quite knows, afterward, how to recover.

“Didn’t think we’d see your face around here again,” Miller says, as he pulls up a stool next to Bellamy. He winces and scowls when Harper elbows him hard in the side.

But Clarke doesn’t seem offended by his lack of tact. The corner of her mouth quirks up. “I wasn’t always sure I’d see your faces again, either,” she admits.

“Not like you missed much,” Octavia grumbles. Now that she’s given Clarke a perfunctory hug, she’s found a spot on the edge of the group, arms crossed against her chest and shoulders square. Maybe Lincoln dragged her here. Maybe her curiosity did. “We’ve been one step away from lockdown—”

“Do we have to talk politics right now?” Raven asks, shooting her a glare. “Clarke’s back. Can’t we just enjoy that for five minutes?”

Raven has her arm around Clarke’s shoulders, and Clarke’s made her body hunched and small. Wondering, Bellamy wonders, what will happen when those five minutes are up? Wondering if the affection was obligation? Wondering where the others are?

“What brought you back, anyway?” Monty asks.

Clarke starts to answer—“I—”—then stops up short. She looks up at Monty, then flicks her eyes to Bellamy’s face. Just for a second, but he notices. He wants to reach out and take her hands, but how can he?

She clears her throat and tries again. “I guess I just couldn’t bear it anymore.”

No one knows how to answer; they can only look away, look down, look up again and try to catch another’s glance. Monty opens his mouth to answer and a crash sounds from the other side of the room.

“Yeah, I know!” a too loud voice yells. Echoes of sloppy footsteps, random banging follow. “I know and I’m _fine_!” Bellamy half turns and catches sight, over his shoulder, of Jasper weaving his way around the tables toward them. He hasn’t seen them yet. A small miracle. But they see him and Clarke—she looks like she’s staring at a ghost.

Bellamy holds out a thin and hopeless hope that Jasper won’t notice them at all, but of course he does: this large group of them in the middle of the room, and obviously the Clarke rumors have come to him too; he acts like it sometimes, but he isn’t a fool. He catches sight of them and stumbles over, attempts at long strides getting his feet caught up in stool legs and table edges. Monty’s half out of his seat but before he can reach him, Jasper’s pushed his way between Bellamy and Miller, and he’s leaning in over the table, as close to Clarke as he can get.

She doesn’t back down.

“Clarke Griffin returns,” he announces, punctuating each word with a loud slam of his palm against the tabletop.

“Jasper, you’re drunk.” If she’s surprised, she doesn’t let it show. The rest of them know that he hasn’t been this bad in a while; a bad feeling is pricking up the back of Bellamy’s neck, and Octavia and Monty are exchanging glances, like formulating some sort of silent plan.

“Yes! Yes, I am. Do you know why?”

He’s half on the table, about a second away from forcing a knee up on to the tabletop. He shakes Monty’s hand off his shoulders.

“It’s not even noon—”

“For the same reason you went off into the woods! Gotta be free somehow!”

“Jasper,” Bellamy tries this time, but the only response he gets is Jasper’s palm thrust out, barely a centimeter from his nose, the sort of impertinent-child gesture Bellamy's long used to from him by now. He could grab his arm and have it twisted up behind his back in a second, if he wanted, but he’s become indulgent in his guilt. All he does is turn away. Clarke doesn’t look like she wants the help anyway. Her face is set, he’s not sure if into an expression of bravery or masochism, but he knows she wants to ride this out.

“No—Clarke—listen. I have to know. Why are you here? What are you saving us from this time? Must be something. You’re coming back to rescue us, like you always do, right?”

This harsh, cruel tone makes Bellamy’s stomach ache, and he imagines Clarke feels sick with it, too. Or maybe it’s nothing to her. Maybe Jasper’s tirade is just another variant of everything she’s said to herself for ten weeks; maybe there’s something comforting in knowing these voices, at least, are real. She doesn’t try to interrupt, just tilts her chin up, the slightest bit, in defiance.

“So what’s the plan now?” Jasper spits. “Who are you going to kill this time—?”

And there, that’s the line crossed, not just for Bellamy, but for Miller, too. He mumbles a gruff, “That’s it,” under his breath, then pulls Jasper back down to the floor and two steps back, as easily as if he were throwing a rag doll around. Jasper, breathing by now in deep, ugly, breaths, and his eyes round and wild with rage, takes the room in with a sweeping, still unseeing, gaze and then—abruptly—he looks down. His body hunches over with what Bellamy first takes to be embarrassment, then dizziness, then nausea. He can’t tell. Monty’s at his side in a moment, won’t let Jasper push him away this time, but before he can lead him back to his quarters, Clarke calls out, “Jasper,” and everyone’s attention snaps to her. Her voice has that old commanding tone to it.

“I’m not here to do anything,” she says. Her eyes are fixed on Jasper, but Bellamy knows she’s talking to all of them, talking to the whole room, and to all of Arkadia beyond. “I know I’m not in charge. I’m staying out of—all of that, this time.”

“Yeah, right,” Jasper mumbles. Everyone pretends not to hear him. And like Bellamy, with everything to say, with nothing to say, they ask no questions.

 

 

It’s been a long time since Bellamy’s seen Jasper truly livid like that. He’s been sullen, disrespectful, depressed, even angry, yes, but with the reflexive anger of someone trying to keep everyone else away—not fiercely angry as he was when he first caught sight of Clarke. The outburst wasn’t a storm, though. It was a harbinger: the first gust of wind and darkening of the sky that comes before a downpour.

 

 

Three days later, Abby calls a meeting, and when Clarke doesn’t show, Bellamy realizes for the first time that he really thought she was lying, when she said she was out. He pretended to believe, yes. When Octavia said, “You know she’s lying. She’s power hungry,” he insisted that Clarke knew her own mind. And then he swallowed down the rest: that he understood, because they’d both wanted power, once, but never power like that, never the power to destroy so completely and so mercilessly. It made sense that she wanted to leave it all behind, it did.

And yet.

Within a few days she’s working in medical with her mom and Jackson, and that, at least, is like the old Clarke. When she’s not at work, she keeps mostly to herself. She doesn't avoid anyone. But she doesn't let anyone in, either.

Not really.

Monty, the only one of them to approach her with true openness, has dinner with her some nights. And Bellamy’s seen her talking with Lincoln—talking like acquaintances talk, all close-lipped smiles and small gestures. Once, he walks into an argument between Clarke and Raven; he doesn’t stick around long enough to hear the topic of their disagreement, but he can guess. Neither one notices him, and he slides out of the room as easily as he’d slid in, and doesn't mention it to either of them after.

Later, when she’s sifting through medical supplies from the latest Mt. Weather run, her hands always moving, her attention conveniently distracted, and he’s just sitting across from her and watching, holding himself still without the need to fidget, she asks him at last. “Do they hate me because of what I did in the Mountain?”

It’s too harsh to say that anyone _hates_ her, even Jasper, but that’s not what he says. It doesn’t matter. He knows the state of mind she’s in. When you hate yourself badly enough, all you see in others’ pain is their disgust. All you see is your own self-loathing mirrored back at you. He could try to convince her otherwise, but that’s not the truth he wants her to hear right now.

“No,” he says. “The Mountain’s going to haunt us all, whether you’re here or not.” He picks up a roll of gauze and shows it to her, like it means something, a talisman, symbol, or relic. “We live with it every day. They’re angry because you thought you could run from the Mountain and all you did was run from your friends.”

Clarke is staring at him as if a foreign language were spilling from his lips. She stares so long and so unflinchingly, and it’s been so many weeks since she’s looked at him, looked at him like he could be sure she was seeing him, that he starts to wonder if maybe his words really were nonsense, after all.

Then she takes the gauze from between his fingers and adds it to one of her neat little piles. And looks down.

“And you?” she asks.

“What about me?”

“Do you hate me?”

Of course he doesn’t. Hating Clarke would be like hating the sun. Sometimes it shines too bright, sometimes it burns, but though he’s lived most of his life without it, with only an imitation of it, sun lamps and circadians and synthesized vitamin tablets in his rations, already he knows he can’t go back. He can’t forget these last months have never happened. He’s dependent on the sun and the Earth under his feet and the wind in the trees, and he’s dependent on Clarke, and he knows it. In this moment, he knows it. It’s a simple realization and it settles over him easily, inspiring no great emotion at all.

Her hands fidget relentlessly.

“No. I don’t hate you.”

It’s not the whole story but he hears her sigh and sees her eyelids flutter closed and he decides that it can be for now.

 

 

Clarke’s been back at Arkadia for three weeks before Bellamy knocks on the door to her new quarters, not because it takes him that long to find the courage, but just because the distance from his room to hers feels too vast. The delay before she answers tells him she doesn’t get visitors often.

Then her voice calling out: “Come in.”

She’s sitting on her bed, flipping through what he thinks must be patient records. Something about her, perhaps her bare feet, or the way she’s put her hair back in a messy bun, so unlike her, makes Bellamy feel like an intruder, and he wants to leave.

Clarke just tilts her head and looks at him, more expectant than surprised.

He forces himself to speak: “I—found this and thought you might like it,” and takes a thin rectangular box from behind his back. He’d considered putting a bow around it, but it’s not a gift, not really. Just a thing. A thing he’s just decided she should have.

Clarke looks confused at first. He comes to sit, tentatively, on the edge of her bed and puts the box down in front of her. As she opens it, the expression on her face changes to surprise, then realization, then pain, and finally to something soft and unnamable, which makes regret swell up in his throat.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” she asks, with a tiny little smile. “Things didn’t exactly end well for the last three people to give me art supplies.”

Bellamy doesn’t know who those people are, and doesn’t want to ask.

“I just thought you’d need something to do,” he hedges. “Since you’re not—”

“Making the rules anymore?”

Her voice is ghost-quiet, and she’s running the tip of her index finger down a blood-red colored pencil, slowly.

“Something like that.”

He’s not sure, but maybe he should leave now, because he still hasn’t said all the things he wants to say and he can’t yet: the storm still hovers over them both. But before he can stand, Clarke’s moved her patient files down to the floor, slid back to lean against the headboard, and she's patting the spot next to her for him to sit back too. So he does. For a few minutes, he just watches her skimming her fingers over the pencils, as if she could feel the different colors through her fingertips.

“Pike’s running against Kane for Chancellor,” he says, and with a deep sigh, as if the news wearied him. “I don’t know if you heard.”

Clarke’s been so disconnected, she’s barely even acknowledged Farm Station’s return, though it’s the biggest event to hit the camp in months. True, she was there when they came through the gates. But he watched her face and saw nothing, no emotion, no reaction, as they trooped in, not even when Miller ran to Bryan, kissed him like two soldiers back from two different wars would kiss; not even when Monty hugged his mother and cried into her shoulder, a child again like Bellamy hasn’t seen him in a long time. The reunions weren’t even over when she slipped away, disappearing into Alpha Station with her hands in her pockets and her shoulders hunched up against her ears. He watched her with his hands twitching and curling into half-fists and a swell of something painful cracking up his ribs.

“Yeah, I know,” she answers now. Her voice is unreadable, quiet and gentle, distant. He considers letting the conversation drop. “Are you voting for him?”

Bellamy’s brow furrows and he says, “No,” like it’s obvious. Clarke pushes a stray strand of hair behind her ear, and something in Bellamy’s chest comes undone. “Are you?” he asks.

“Oh, no.” Her nose wrinkles and she shakes her head. “No. He’s been out in a war zone and he thinks he’s still there. I don’t trust him.”

“Do you trust Kane?”

This time, Clarke doesn’t answer as quickly. She looks up, straightens her back and leans against the headboard, staring out at the far wall. “Yes,” she says finally. “I do. I wish there was another option, though.” A quick glance over to him. “Like you.”

Bellamy just snorts. “I’m not interested in being Chancellor.”

“So you just want to see the same people pass the crown around in a circle for eternity?” The way she speaks, the sharpness in her voice, tells him she isn’t as checked out as she pretends. She still cares about their people, cares so deeply and so hard that it scares her, and that’s why, even now that she’s here—home, or the closest they come to it—she’s still running. Knowing this makes it easier to convince himself that he’ll forgive her, truly, in time.

“No. Actually letting the people _choose_ Kane might be a good first step, though.”

“Good first step to what? A real democracy?”

She sounds like she’s coming alive.

“Never thought I’d hear an Alpha Station girl say the word ‘democracy’ like that.” He means it to sound like a joke, but it's his vision of Alpha coming through: a place for the elite to wrap themselves up in illusions of control and safety, to find comfort in the lies he's always known better than to believe.

“I’m not really an Alpha Station girl anymore.”

No—she's not, and hasn't been in a long time. She's not a princess either, not the Chancellor's daughter, not a leader, not anything. A blank slate, maybe. A new beginning.

“This is the best we can do,” Bellamy says, after a long silence, and as lightly and simply as he can. “At least for now. Until someone,” he bumps his shoulder against her shoulder, starts to smile, “comes out of retirement.”

She laughs, weary but the sound makes him feel bright. Even when the last of her laughter falls away, there’s still a smile on her lips. “Yeah, well, you’ll be waiting a long time.”

“That’s okay.” He takes her hand and gives it a squeeze. The feel of her palm against his palm and her fingers between his fingers feels too nice, he doesn’t want to pull away, and she doesn’t either. “We can wait. I can wait. I can wait a long time, if I have to.”

"Mmmm," she hums. She's started to trace something, he's not sure what, with the index finger of her free hand on the top sheet of drawing paper. "I'll be waiting too." She's not talking anymore about the Chancellorship, or politics, or leadership. He knows this with simple, comforting clarity, and it brings him peace. "I'm not going anywhere. We can take our time this time, for once."

 


End file.
